Archive

I’ve always used the clockwork mod recoveries, and apparently now they do a touch version for those phones without keyboards.

The easy install is a paid app from the market, but they give away the image for free, if you’re daring enough to flash it yourself. Here’s the easy way how (standard disclaimers apply: this worked for me, it might set you on fire. Sorry but not my fault if it does). Bits between `backticks` are commands to be executed (eg `echo “I am a command!”`).

We’re talking about the international SGS3, the GT-I900. It originally came from T-Mobile UK.

1. Get root.

2. Get the android dev tools so you can connect to your phone using adb. You’ll need to enable USB debugging too 😉

3. Head to the ClockworkMod download page and get the latest touch recovery for your “Samsung Galaxy S3 (GT-I9300)”, at the moment it’s recovery-clockwork-touch-6.0.1.2-i9300.img. Note the fact it’s a .img file. Put this somewhere on your phone. I’m sticking it on the _internal_ SD-Card.

4. open a command prompt (`cmd` on windows) and check your PC can see your phone `adb devices`. You should see a device attached.

5. Get a shell on the phone (`adb shell`) and then get root (`su`). The end of your prompt should change from a $ to a # when you’ve got root. (eg, from “[email protected]:/ $” to “[email protected]:/ #”).

6. Change location to where you’ve got your image downloaded. On my phone/current firmware (stock samsung, latest) it’s /sdcard/, so `cd /sdcard/`. `ls` will list files, so you can make sure your image is there.If you’re having problems finding the sdCard mount location, the _external_ sdcard seems to be at `/mnt/extSdCard` but you can get a list of mounts with `mount`.

so we’re interested in `/dev/block/mmcblk0p6`
`dd if=/dev/block/mmcblk0p6 of=./recovery-backup.img` makes a backup of our current image.

8. Blank the recovery partition:
Here be dragons! If things go wrong between now and the end of step 10, you might be buggered.
Probably not needed, but we write zeros to the recovery partition to blank it `dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p6`.

9. Write the new recovery -Still a dangerous place to be. Obviously you have a full battery and are in aeroplane mode?
“recovery-clockwork-touch-6.0.1.2-i9300.img” is the name of the image. If you’ve got it in a zip or tar file then you should have extracted it first. I’ve renamed it to “recoveryTouch.img” for ease.
`dd if=./recovery.img of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p6` flashes the image to the partition.

10. `sync` afterwards, because it’s just a nice thing to do

11. Switch off the phone in the usual way, and then hold down [Volume UP] + [menu] + [Power] to switch it back on.
You should now be booted into your nice new touch recovery.